Please join Associate Professor Erin Brannigan in conversation with artists Matthew Day, Dr. Diana Baker Smith (UNSW Art and Design), and Dr. Clare Britton (UNSW School of Arts and Media) to launch Erin’s book, The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023).
The Persistence of Dance: Choreography and Contemporary Art 1990s-2020s is the second of two monographs by Erin on dance and the visual arts, the first being Choreography, Visual Art, and Experimental Composition 1950s-1970s (London: Routledge, 2022). The Persistence of Dance seeks to understand a new field of intermedial creative work that has garnered attention from our major art institutions, changed the way that dance circulates in cultural economies, and become an exemplar of post-disciplinary art. This work is distinct from contemporary dance presented on the stage that has its lineage in theatre and ballet, and is rather contemporary choreography where the central preoccupations and conditions correspond to those driving the broader contemporary arts: dance as contemporary art medium. Such dance-based works have found their way into visual arts contexts through a lineage including choreographers such as Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer. This work, currently exemplified in the case studies in the book (Meg Stuart, Sarah Michelson, Maria Hassabi, Shelley Lasica, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Adam Linder, Boris Charmatz and Latai Taumoepeau), is neither subsumed into the logic of the visual arts from its outside nor an invention from within. Rather, the book argues for the crucial role such work has played within broader aesthetic developments in the arts since the mid-twentieth century, and its position today as a distinct permutation of art categories such as the post-conceptual and post-disciplinary in the contemporary situation.
RSVP: e.brannigan@unsw.edu.au
Erin Brannigan is Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of New South Wales. She is of Irish and Danish political exile, convict, and settler descent. Her publications include Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers, co-edited with Virginia Baxter (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2014), Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s -1970s (London: Routledge, 2022) and The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2023).
The Intermedial Composition Network explores the creative practices of leading artists working in all media as a site of experiment, innovation, resilience and imagination. By intermedial composition we refer to the process of convergence across multiple art forms in the creative act, including the way in which compositional practices in one field might inform – and transform - those in another. This focus on intermediality within our collective both works with and against our post-disciplinary historical moment, honouring both discipline specificity and intermedial experimentation. Alongside practice, our members understand that insight into creative process is enhanced by interdisciplinary conversation, and that such insights reveal novel methods and outcomes and support their application to broader fields of social and cultural activity.
Living on Bidjigal Land, Clare Britton is an artist interested in how images and landscapes hold stories. Informed by her work in live performance, Clare's visual art practice includes installation, site-specific art and writing. Clare's PhD, A Week on the Cooks River, was completed at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney (2020) and her work as a part of performance collective My Darling Patricia (2004-14) informs her approach. Clare lectures and researches at the Esme Timbrey Creative Practice Lab, UNSW and works as a part of Magnetic Topographies with artists Therese Keogh and Kenzee Patterson. Her work has attracted awards for sculpture, performance, design & research and toured in Australia and Internationally.
Choreographer | Designer | Performer
Matthew Day (1979) is interested in the potential of choreography to negotiate unorthodox relationships and propose new ways of being human. Utilizing a minimalist approach, he often works with duration and repetition, approaching the body as a site of infinite potential, and choreography as a field of energetic intensity and exchange.
Raised in Sydney, Day was a teenage ballroom dancing champion. He studied Dance and Performance Studies in Sydney and Melbourne (2003-2005), before collaborating with students at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam (2006-2009). Day has been an artist in residence at Temperance Hall and presented his work extensively in Australia and Europe. He also undertook a Masters of Choreography at DAS in Amsterdam.
Diana Baker Smith is an artist who works at the intersection of performance and moving image. Her artistic practice examines the politics of art history through methods of archival research, collaboration, embodiment, and fiction. She lives on Gadigal land in Sydney and is a Lecturer in the School of Art & Design at the University of New South Wales. Baker Smith’s recent solo exhibitions include This Place Where They Dwell at Penrith Regional Gallery (2024), Falling Towards Another (A Score for the Void), Judy Wheeler Commission at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2024) and She Speaks in Sculpture at UTS Art Gallery (2022). She is a founding member of the art collective Barbara Cleveland, whose works are held in collections including Artbank, Art Gallery of NSW, Museum of Contemporary Art, Monash University Museum of Art and Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art.
